Roman Candle

No name #1, #2, and #3 are among his best songs, delicate and complicated and amazing guitar, all of it, even though this was his first solo record, randomly recorded in someone’s house or something like that, as were the two records to follow. The rest of the record honestly wanders a bit (that is, within an Elliott Smith-specific bell curve rating system of six records). Anyway, go on, go on.

Elliott Smith

The first of the two brilliant “acousti-mope” records (as the husband categorizes my love of acoustic cry-fi type music) showcasing all of the impossible-to-sing chord changes, sounds of fingers sliding on the strings, witty beautiful guitar playing, breathless singing Elliott stuff that makes him great. It's one of those albums where you listen to the whole thing and there isn’t a miss on it.

It’s quite likely that every song on the album is about whiskey or heroin. The guy knew what he liked. The line high on amphetamines/the moon is a lightbulb breaking from St. Ides Heaven made me want to race out and score speed although I am not really sure how to go about that and anyway, caffeine will have to do.

It’s dumb to list the good songs since they are all good songs, but Coming Up Roses is my favorite song to sing very badly in the car. I I have heard this song maybe one million times and it always sounds incredible to me.

Two separate songs on this record (Single File and Needle in the Hay) both use one of my favorite, simple Elliott lines: you idiot kid.

Either/Or

More great songs about whiskey and heroin could easily have been the subtitle, not that you’d notice, listening to the opening of a song like Angeles, with the drop-dead guitar playing and the menacing vocals and all that, making your hair stand on end. Actually, what the hell is Angeles about anyway? Let’s go to the phones… nope, still can’t figure it out.

An embarrassment of riches, with Alameda, Speed Trials, Cupid’s Trick (the big electric guitar number), etc. etc. This guy played his own drums and most of the instruments, and recorded this stuff in some guy’s house, and it sounds like the Beatles. For me, the bitter, yet sesame-streetlike march of Pictures of Me is the one to sing in the car.

X/O

This is the major label debut, and this is where Elliott Smith may have checked some of his mopier fans at the door. This album is a hybrid of his former sound, and a new Sgt. Peppered psychedelic electric kind of thing that was ambitious but required appreciating him in a new way. I admit I wanted to hang on to songs like Angeles while sucking my thumbs and living in my Leonard Cohen afterworld, and kind of went a little bit kicking and screaming into the Sgt. Pepper Elliott years.

But back to the album. I think he was finding his footing here with the new major label thing and the new sound, and this record, while it had some great songs on it, didn’t feel entirely cohesive to me. I remember when I bought it, I latched on to certain songs (Amity, the rock! song. I like rock! Elliott), Independence Day (a song that was to me a great marriage of his former sound and his new, brighter, more ambitious produced sound… and yet… a song about drugs) and Waltz #2 (a song that got some vague airplay around that time and that showed Elliott’s brilliance as a musician, the piano and waltz beat and Beatley (I will not say “Beatlesque”) vocal harmonies, and the line I’m never going to know you now / but I’m gonna love you anyhow, the way the song sort of stops right before he sings it).

Figure 8

This is where I, the Elliott fan, was too much of a clinging idiot to follow him completely to where he was going at this point in his career. I bought this album when it came out and was greeted by (with two notably classic alterna-mope exceptions, Everything Reminds me of Her and Somebody That I Used to Know), a very produced, full-blown Sgt. Pepper sound (listen to Pretty Mary K, literally recorded in the Beatles’ Abbey Road studio) to get what I’m saying. This was a hard pill for the alterna-moper to swallow. Where were the luminous ballads about heartbreak and malt liquor? What’s this about a soldier lying in bed / with a wound to the head? Paging Paul McCartney!!

Years later, Elliott dies. In my period of Elliott-mourning, I give this one a listen again. Whoops. Seems I had overlooked the fact that, on Figure 8, Elliott had emerged on the other side of the unsteadiness of XO as a brilliant and changed songwriter who’d made a great concept album. Once I got it, I couldn’t believe my ears. What a moron I had been, clinging to the Christian Brothers whiskey bottle, what with hi-fi greatness like Happiness and Can’t Make a Sound out there for the taking. The last few minutes of Can’t Make A Sound, on headphones, or Happiness, for that matter, will send you into a sonic haze followed by a hangover of realization that he is now dead and no more.

From a Basement on the Hill

My review of this album is tainted by having heard pared down acoustic bootlegs of most of its songs in advance of this release.  On the record, they are totally different songs, with epic layers of brown horse psychedelic electronic studio frosting.  Which, if you like rawk!! Elliott, this is your record. Thankfully there is only one Elliott I don’t embrace and that is, campy ragtime piano Elliott which only makes a single appearance on Figure 8. But I digress.
 
Does the record flat out rule?  Yes—and I’m not just giving a bonus swan song rating. Not sure how suicide is the logical end-note to something this sophisticated. During the intra-state listening party that Nup and I had, where we both heard the record for the first time, we were awed. The first song, Coast to Coast, is a supersonic smackdown of the first order. Speaking of smack, Nup probably correctly guessed that on King's Crossing, "that's the brown horse talkin'."

My bootleg perspective taints my view of A Distorted Reality and Strung out Again, which are bleak, bleak songs live, great songs. On the record, they are definitely swirlier and less emotional. No studio effect can best his starkest live performance. My favorite song at the moment is Twilight, which is just a killer, it's like three minutes with someone you never thought you'd see again.

Goodbye Elliott.